Overshadowed
This stretch has been h a r d.
A serious lack of hugs, connection hindered by rain and cold and patchy internet, even more change and still with the looming fear of catch or no catch and what will or won’t be.
Fear and anxiety have flowed more than ebbed and the tidal undulations of thoughts and feelings become more of a rollercoaster car on a closed circuit track that has got stuck in a dip.
King writer of words that describe this very journey, David, calls it overwhelmed. Literally to be covered over with darkness. Like a shroud that obscures or the reducing fading vision when you faint; when weariness and need to escape literally overtake and unconscious nightime envelops.
Whatever language you put round it we’ve all felt it.
So back at Christmas time when I read the story of a young girl being overshadowed, something inside of me quickened as I tried to grasp how and why the story of good news began with being described as overshadowed. Enough with the darkness!
And then I found something beautiful.
Ancient Gates (The way ahead)
Thunder. Between France and England, the last week we’ve heard a lot of it. A sound that at the very least demands a pause of acknowledgement. From there the spectrum of response spreads through wide eyed questioning, pillow hunkering, and all the way to fully fledged fear or, in the case of my boys, excitement filled rush to the window awe and wonder.
Whether you love it or hate it, run to it or from it, it’s an almost out of this world interruption that is tangibly real.
Hearth and Home
In the midst of isolation, God is restoring the centrality of hearth and home to the way that we work and live and connect. He is saving our oikos. It’s not that we won’t gather again to feast and celebrate– but that this is our primary space in which we encounter him, and which each of us finds a place to belong.
The Bread Revival
No sooner had the comically ridiculous but nonetheless troubling national loo roll shortage abated, there began the national flour shortage as thousands of us with the need for distraction from our screens, combined with hunger (mostly of the stressed and bored kind) turned to breadmaking…..and thus began a revival.
Hope flew in
Something amazing and beautiful happened the other day.
But first I need to tell you about
Talitha Koum
These last six weeks have both gone by in a flash, here and gone as quickly as the birds I notice more than ever in the garden, and as second-hand tickingly slowly as waiting for my sourdough bread to be ready. The world of lockdown is a world of……..